Minister cautions against summer holiday bookings
James ChappleThe UK’s vaccine minister has cautioned people against making summer holiday bookings, stressing it is still "too early" to be thinking about their getaways.
Appearing on Sky News on Tuesday morning (26 January), Nadhim Zahawi said with the UK’s vaccination programme having only just reached what he described as "base camp" and with tougher border measures imminent to guard against the import of new strains of coronavirus, the focus must be on protecting that vaccination process.
Zahawi confirmed an announcement on "quarantine hotels" would follow later on Tuesday after several days of speculation and trails, although he refused to be drawn on specifics.
Asked by presenter Niall Paterson whether his advice to people thinking about booking a summer holiday right now would be "don’t", Zahawi replied: "Absolutely."
"At the moment, we’ve reached base camp with the vaccine deployment programme, over six and a half million people now with the first dose. There’s a long way to go.
"There’s still 37,000 people in hospital with Covid at the moment. It’s far too early for us to even speculate about the summer."
On the subject of quarantine hotels, Zahawi said as more people were vaccinated it became increasingly important to guard against new variants, stressing the quarantine hotel policy was part of broader review of measures at the UK’s borders.
"Once you have that protection [from the vaccine], and you don’t have new variants in the country, you should protect against them," said Zahawi.
"It is when they are spreading that it becomes negligible in terms of difference in terms of what you do at the border once they are already on your shores and spreading heavily."
Appearing ahead of Zahawi, TTG editor Sophie Griffiths said the quarantine hotel policy would come as another major blow to the travel sector, particular amid an upturn in people looking to make holiday plans.
"We’ve seen an increase in people making enquiries for holidays, and we’ve seen an increase in people actually booking," said Griffiths.
"They want to go away, and if we don’t have a roadmap out of this crisis, then that’s going to be incredibly dangerous for the industry because of the thousands of jobs that are reliant on it.
"So we need to know are these quarantine measures still going to be in place by summer, and can the government give any kind of suggestion of when they will be review because we need to have that detail for the travel industry to function and for thousands of jobs to be protected."
It may be too early for you, minister, to speculate about the summer, but for the hundreds of thousands of people employed in the UK's holiday sector – both domestic and outbound – their very livelihoods depend on it. They need clarity right now, a roadmap out of this situation, to ensure they take the right steps to survive the coming weeks and months, particularly with summer getaways looking increasingly likely to face at least some degree of disruption from Covid. While we all know the horse bolted long again when it came to our borders, there is an appreciation throughout travel that tougher measures at the border, at this time, are necessary at an extremely delicate and fragile moment in the NHS's incredible efforts to vaccinate the country, and many would even go so far as to accept that the extra pain now may well pay off in the months – perhaps even years – to come. But the government must do its bit – it must give the industry hope through immediate sector-specific support to mitigate another extended period of limited operations, and set out a tangible roadmap for the resumption of international travel.
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James Chapple
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